Defragmenting Daniel: The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by Jason Werbeloff

  Daniel tried to count. To find sevens in the chaos. But the buildings weren’t in rows or columns. There was no order here.

  We had you cleaned

  We had you eat

  He rubbed his eye. Tried to bury the memory of the song.

  We love your toes

  We love your meat

  Odin crawled out of the rucksack and perched on Daniel’s shoulder. They surveyed the destruction together. Daniel could hardly feel the cat’s claws burrowing into his clavicle.

  “No good,” said Daniel, echoing the old shopkeeper.

  He walked over to one of the mounds of rubble. Heat radiating from the stones baked his cheeks.

  Odin meowed. Dug his claws deeper into Daniel’s chest.

  “What do you want here?” called out a voice.

  Odin darted into the satchel as Daniel whirled around. His cybernetic knee grinded with the sudden turn.

  “You have no business here,” said a man. He wore a holey t-shirt and a week-long beard. His eyes were swollen. Frantic.

  “I’m looking for Porcu–”

  “We don’t need your help,” hissed the Holey Man.

  “I’m not here to help. I’m looking for Porcuperry Road.”

  “You PeoPle …” The man spat his P’s “… from up north think you better than us. What with your implanted parts and such.” He nosed the air in the general direction of Daniel’s cybernetic knee.

  “Sir, I mean no disrespect, but I don’t like my knee. I’d rather have my original.”

  The filthy man’s eyes snapped back to Daniel’s face. “What’s that you say?”

  “The Orphanage took my parts to pay my debt. I never wanted the replacements they gave me.” Daniel flexed his leg. The joint wheezed as he lowered it slowly to the earth.

  “Hmmm.” The Holey Man stroked his grizzled chin. He had a gash along the bottom of his arm. Were those maggots wiggling along the edges? The man needed a good scrub of Rejek.

  “What was it you’re looking for?” asked the Holey Man.

  “84 Porcuperry Road.”

  “Porcuperry was … fi-si-seven blocks down.”

  Daniel’s heart quickened. He eyed the broken streets. Doubted he’d be able to make out city blocks in this mess.

  The man sighed. “I’ll take you.” He turned on his feet and walked off, not waiting to see if Daniel followed.

  The carnage grew thicker as they hiked into the epicenter of New Settlers Way. And the stench. The sulfurous pong of burnt hair singed Daniel’s sinuses. He knew that stench well – from the Spares department at the back of the Organ Farm where they chopped up the animals.

  Eventually, the man stopped. Stood atop a hillock of rubble. The bricks were hot underfoot. “I thinks this was Porcuperry.” The man swung his arm like a pendulum, perpendicular to the main street.

  “Would you know which way is eighty four?” asked Daniel.

  The man shrugged. A tick dropped off his head onto one of the sunbaked bricks. The insect panicked for a moment. Then resigned, and sizzled in the heat.

  Daniel was about to walk away – he guessed left was as good as right – when the Holey Man stopped him. Placed a long, grimy set of fingers on Daniel’s shoulder. “It happened not a week ago. We was doing nothin’ wrong. They came in, the Police and the Bubble Guard with their shiny badges and tanks and guns. Blasted everythin’ to nothin’.”

  “But why?” Daniel shifted his weight so he stood on a more stable brick, about a foot below the Holey Man.

  The Man stood tall, his head framed by a passing cloud. “We’re the Sect of Seven,” he said. The sudden defiance in his voice impelled Daniel to retreat a step further.

  “Seven?” Daniel swallowed. Billions of needles pricked his spine. “You believe in seven too?”

  The Holey Man peered at Daniel from under his broken glasses. “Seven ain’t much ta-do with the Sect of Seven. Yeah, we used to pray seven times a day, and bow seven times. That sorta thing. But it got tedious. Nowadays, we use seven for what it represents.”

  Daniel’s fists were bunched in his pockets. He tried to relax. He’d never known anyone other than himself to talk about sevens. It made sense that his mother would live among these people.

  That said, Daniel had never put much stock in the notion that blood relations meant anything. He couldn’t, not when he’d seen blood running down the drains every day at the Organ Farm. What did biology matter, when it was reduced to piles of meat? There was no meaning in a lump of meat.

  But now, hearing about the number seven, Daniel felt a kinship with his mother. He suddenly knew he would find her. She was a Seven too, just like him.

  “What does it represent?” he asked.

  “Completion,” said the man immediately. “Seven represents completion.”

  Daniel thought about that for a moment. That wasn’t the answer he’d expected. Beauty, maybe. Or symmetry. But completion?

  “Completion of the body,” continued the Holey Man. “Of the seven organs the Bubblers steal from our chests: two kidneys, two lungs, the heart, the liver, and the spleen. We keep our organs. To ourselves. That’s why they come here.” He swung a trembling arm across the ruins. “That’s why they pillage our bodies. Our land.”

  The man’s grubby, ailing frame took on ever more dignity as he spoke. His voice deepened. Gravitas leeched his face, his cheeks scarlet with passion.

  “We believe in the sanctity of the body. We give not away what is not ours ta give. The Gods gave us our organs. Only the Gods may take them away.”

  Daniel was insignificant beside this man. This man who spoke of Gods in the plural. This man who had purpose. Daniel had worked out the importance of sevens already, on his own. And for that he was proud. But he hadn’t realized the importance of the body. Of its wholeness. He’d never protested the “donations” the Orphanage had forced from him.

  The Holey Man sniffed the air, his chin high. “I know number eighty four Porcuperry. It’s the Old Missionary. Come.”

  They wound their way around and over heaps of rubble, until they reached a cluster of buildings less damaged than the rest. These were missing their façades in places. Windows and doors had been blown in. But the structures stood, unlike their unfortunate cousins.

  As they neared, music perforated the air, soft but certain. The sound of a piano. A series of notes, a pause, then the series again.

  “Here it is.”

  84

  was painted in careful white lettering beside the door. Daniel’s heart swirled in his ears as they entered.

  “Janice, I’m back.”

  An elderly woman hobbled into view. “Who’s this now?”

  “Found the young’un on the street,” said the Holey Man.

  “Let me look at you.” She lifted Daniel’s chin. Shoved her face so close, their noses touched. Her breath was saccharine. As though she’d swallowed a gallon of honey.

  That’s when she saw his knee.

  “Lords! You brought a Bubbler into our home.”

  “He ain’t no Bubbler. He’s an orphan this one.”

  “Nemesis above.” The old woman lifted her hand. Traced a shape around her chest. A circle? “Poor child.” Her face softened. “What you want here?”

  “I’m looking for my mother,” said Daniel. His tongue was so dry it clicked as he spoke.

  “Your what?” The woman hacked into her hand. It came away spotted red.

  “My mother.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Daniel panicked. Now that he was here, now that he was about to meet her, he couldn’t remember her name. They would think he was lying if he didn’t say it now. How could he not remember her name?

  He was about to reach for the piece of paper in his pocket, when it came to him.

  “Alicia. Alicia Mendez.”

  The old woman’s arthritic finger made the shape on her chest again. Not just a circle. A wheel. With three intercrossing spokes.

  “Where is she?” ask
ed Daniel.

  The Holey Man’s eyes fell to the floor.

  “Come,” said the old woman. She led him up the remains of a staircase. Up to the fourth floor.

  “This was her room.”

  Daniel stood in the center of the space. A mattress on the cracked concrete floor. A leather-bound book beside the bed – he recognised the wheel with three spokes on its cover. A dresser beneath a hole in the wall. Sunlight streamed through, illuminating a shard of dust.

  “We left it just the same. Some of the others wanted the room. But it didn’t … it didn’t feel right,” said the Holey Man.

  Daniel examined the mattress. He hadn’t seen the stains at first. Blood in the deep blue fabric. He knelt. Ignored the groan in his left knee. The bed had no sheet or blanket, but there was a pillow. He settled his head onto its surface. Shut his eyes.

  Pineapple. Faint but unmistakable.

  Tears sprung to Daniel’s eyes.

  “She didn’t suffer,” said Janice.

  “The shrapnel pierced her heart,” said the Holey Man. “We did everything we could.”

  Daniel remembered the only memory he had of her. Of his mother. The flapping leaves of the Birch. How soft her cheek had been against his. Her pineapple perfume.

  “You just missed her,” said Janice. “The Guard invaded New Settlers Way a week ago.”

  “The barbarians don’t like our way,” said the Holey Man.

  Daniel sniffed away the tears. Sat up on the mattress.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We oppose organ transplants,” said Janice. “The human body was never meant to be chopped and changed as the Bubblers do. We spread the word of the Gods. Of Nemesis. Completion. Wholeness. Balance. The message of the Sect of Seven. The Truth reaches more ears every day. More find the path of light.”

  The Holey Man scratched around in his left ear. “They hurt us, sure. But the Truth will always win in the face of darkness.” He examined his fingernail.

  “We will prevail,” said Janice.

  Daniel considered their words. There was a pastor at the Organ Farm. So he’d heard the word ‘God’ used before. But the pastor used the term very differently. In the singular.

  Daniel quoted the pastor now. “All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it,” he said. “We exchange organs because we are all one body, and to give one’s organ is a holy act.”

  Janice’s lips thinned to a frosty line. “Boy, be careful. You blaspheme on your mother’s deathbed.”

  Blood ran into Daniel’s cheeks.

  “Does this look like the work of the Gods’ army?” spat the Holey Man. He pointed a trembling finger to the ruins outside the window. “Your mother died at the hand of those … organ rapists.”

  A vein in Daniel’s forehead throbbed.

  “Your mother knew the Truth,” said Janice. “She was whole. Complete. She was a True Seven.”

  Daniel’s artificial cornea dripped. His knee ached. His lungs struggled in the dust. Daniel knew Janice and the Holey Man were right. This was not the work of the Gods.

  The Orphanage. The Bubblers. They had taken the parts of him they’d wanted. They had taken his soul. In return, they’d promised Daniel his parents. But they’d taken his mother from him before he could find her. They’d taken everything from him.

  The taste of iron, the taste of injustice, the bitterness flooded the back of his mouth.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  Janice glanced down at his knee. She shook her head.

  “Your parts are missin’,” said the Holey Man. “They ain’t together the way the Gods intended. You ain’t pure. Nothin’ you can do if you ain’t pure.”

  Daniel’s gaze rested on the bloodstained mattress. He remembered that feeling in the hospital yesterday. Wanting to tear out the nurse’s throat. That feeling coursed through him now. It throbbed in his fists. His nails bit deep into his palms. It clenched his jaw. It pumped through his blood. It beat at the center of him.

  There was only one way to become pure again. Only one way to reclaim the connection to his mother. Only one way to become complete.

  Daniel needed his parts back.

  Hearrt Is No Prroblema

  Daniel stumbled from his mother’s deathbed. He retched.

  “You alright, boy?”

  “Leave him be. Nothing ta be done for him now.”

  Once he’d spilled the guts of him, once the warmth had left his body, he propped himself up. Stumbled out of the missionary, away from 84 Porcuperry. Back the way he’d come.

  Odin cried in the back of his satchel, as Daniel hiked through the rubble of New Settlers Way, until he left the broken town. Through an adrenaline-fueled haze he found his way to the main road that passed through the Gutter. Back to Geppetto’s shop.

  “Didn’t find what you were looking for?” asked Florenza.

  For the first time since he’d left the stained mattress, he looked up.

  Daniel was too tired to hide the tears. His eyes stung from the smoke of the smoldering town. His left eye had swollen shut.

  “She … wasn’t.”

  Florenza took a drag of her cigarette. Looked through him with her wide brown eyes that knew everything, and nodded.

  Daniel sat beside her on the sidewalk.

  “I smelt her,” he said after a while.

  Florenza waited. Listened.

  “She died a week ago. I waited so long to … and now that part of me, the waiting, is gone. But I could still smell her.”

  Florenza placed a hand on his knee. Something hot, something electric, shot up his groin and into his brainstem.

  “We’re all missing parts of us,” she said.

  They sat there a long while. Daniel cried silently. Florenza smoked.

  “Come inside,” she said eventually. “There’s lunch on the table.”

  Daniel stepped into the store. A rush of humidity singed his cheeks. His eyes felt better immediately.

  “Puttingg the washingg in the drryerr now,” said Geppetto. “Ah, you brrought him back.” The shopkeeper smiled, and hobbled over to shake the boy’s hand. His cane bump … bump … bumped on the linoleum floor. If he noticed the moisture on Daniel’s cheeks, he ignored it. “You want to help me with the washingg, Daniel?”

  The boy nodded. Loaded the dryer. His hands burned as he handled the wet clothing. A current lived in his fingertips. An electricity he couldn’t ignore.

  *

  One day became two. Became three. Became seven. Daniel worked in the shop during the day, helping the old man with the laundry business. He ignored the men who stepped into the back room with Florenza in the afternoons. Ignored their moans and ejaculations.

  By night, he and Odin slept in the spare room above the shop. In his dreams, sweaty and stale, horned beasts of fire stormed through New Settlers Way. The demons scorched and slashed the town. Barreled through the streets. Emerald blood, the color of Rejek, oozed through pores in the bricks of the fallen buildings. Flames charred the sky.

  “What can I do?” he asked his mother, every night. She wore a white nightie. White, but for the crimson blossom over her heart. “You know what to do. Find them. Find your parts,” she said, before he woke.

  “You rready forr morre?” asked Geppetto one morning over breakfast.

  Daniel glanced up from his cereal. “More?”

  “He’s not ready,” said Florenza.

  “Is his choice,” said the old man.

  Florenza shook her head. The doorbell tinkled. “He’s not ready,” she said softly, and left the room.

  Daniel swallowed the last of his muesli. He couldn’t taste it. Not really. The tongue still hadn’t grown buds. Maybe it never would. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Come,” said Geppetto, and grabbed his cane.

  As they ascended the stairs at the back of the shop, Daniel regretted asking. He was sure the old man would ask Daniel to do what Florenza did with those men in the af
ternoons. Geppetto had been kind to him, but Florenza was right – he wasn’t ready for that. He doubted he’d ever be ready for that. Daniel had never kissed a girl, let alone – well, Daniel wasn’t ready for that.

  But he followed the shopkeeper, past the spare room where Odin slept, past Geppetto’s, to the third and final door on the top floor. The old man removed a chain from his neck, upon which hung three gilded keys. He unlocked the door with one, and unbolted two more locks with the others. Daniel’s heart leapt as the door opened. He knew that smell. Knew it well.

  Umami at the back of his throat. The scent of blood.

  The scent of organs.

  Florenza’s voice slunk up the stairs. “Right this way.” Daniel assumed she was taking another man into her bed downstairs, but footsteps echoed up the wooden staircase. “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Hampshire.”

  He wanted to glance back, to see who it was Florenza was leading his way, but his eyes were fixed forward. At the unlocked room.

  A flat steel table stood in the middle of the space. It looked like the vivisection tables the instructors used in the Spares department at the back of the Organ Farm. Except this table wasn’t full of animal hair. The metal had been scoured down to its bare molecules. A tray of implements, arranged in size order, perched beside the table. And around the operating area, on the floor, on the ceiling, and on the walls, was a thick, murky plastic. It had been scrubbed clean, but Daniel couldn’t help but notice the faint but unmistakable emerald stains of Rejek.

  “Do you think it will take away the yellow in my cheeks?” asked a thin voice.

  “I’m sure it will,” said Florenza. “It helped last time, didn’t it?”

  A woman older than anyone Daniel had ever seen squeezed past him.

  “Let me take that for you,” said Florenza, and removed the old lady’s coat.

  She wore sunglasses and a mint-green gown with an open back. Mothballs and cinnamon trailed behind her as she made her way to the table in the center of the room. Skin hung off her in gentle folds.

  “You won’t tell my son, will you? He doesn’t know about the …” Her voice dropped to a murmur “… drinking.”